Often you can have too much of a good thing. Take Channel 4’s Clipbank digital library, for example. This offers teachers a veritable feast of video clips that have been specially selected for 11-16 year olds. There are currently seven Clipbank libraries covering science, geography, history, design and technology and languages. Each library offers around 250 clips of variable length and they are ideal for illustrating various concepts or phenomena.
The Achilles heel of Clipbank has in the past been the time taken to find the specific clips. So full marks to Channel 4 for addressing this issue and what’s more, offering Clipbank Utilities, a free tool that can be downloaded from the Clipbank website and used to search Clipbank.
Accessibility
First, transfer your Clipbank files on to a server or local computer. I used the Science Clipbank DVD-Rom discs and downloaded the files on to my hard drive. Then simply register the Clipbank media that’s stored on the hard drive you’re ready to go.
Note that the current version of Clipbank Utilities is a beta version, which means that it’s still being developed. Even so, I was impressed. You can browse for clips by topic, type or QCA list. You can also use a keyword search. Once you’ve found your clip you are presented with a control screen that includes a small window which displays the clip and VCR-type controls underneath for play, pause, fast forward and rewind.
It’s pretty impressive stuff, but it gets even better. You can take a screen snapshot for example, by simply pressing an on-screen button, and there are several other useful tools for teachers wanting to customise the Clipbank library.
My favourite tool is the playlist function, which lets you build up your own video clip playlists.
Clipbank Utilities
Free software for enhancing Clipbank library usage
www.channel4.com/clipbank
